Mainstream-media bombshell

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Correcting the damage done by sloppy journalism is just
about as hard as getting the sticky stuff back into its container.
And a correction, even a retraction, almost never has the same
impact as the original news reporting.

All of which should make those of us in the news business
intensely aware of the importance of accuracy. It's not good enough
to get the news first; you have to get it right. Yet, in the age of
the Internet and instant communication, accuracy and speed
increasingly work against each other - and against standard
practices like multiple sourcing and named sources. Such practices
are there for a reason. In the case of erroneous reporting, real
people's reputations, livelihoods and sometimes lives are at
stake.

Rarely have the consequences of running with a half-baked tip been
as disastrous as in the case of the misbegotten Newsweek report in
the May 9 issue of desecration of the Koran by American
interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. In recent days,
the report has sparked riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza, even
Indonesia. Sixteen people have died, more than 100 people have been
wounded, and the image of the United States in the Muslim world has
taken a blow bigger than that inflicted by the Abu Ghraib abuse
scandal. The damage simply cannot be overestimated.

On Monday, Newsweek editors retracted the story after considerable
official pressure to account for its allegations. Previously, this
weekend, Newsweek had acknowledged that their one anonymous source
was no longer sure of his information - i.e., that he had seen a
report of an internal Pentagon investigation which was about to
reveal that American interrogators had humiliated their prisoners
by flushing the Muslim holy book either whole or in parts down a
toilet. In the days following, no substantiation whatsoever for
this claim has been found.

The disaster here has several origins: First, Newsweek went to
print on a tip without actually seeing the document in question,
having apparently only asked a Pentagon spokesman to confirm or
deny the report, which he declined to do. Second, there was clearly
a total lack of understanding of Muslim religious sensitivities;
the desecration of the Koran is a capital offense in Muslim
countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan, as British
author Salman Rushdie found years ago when he published "The
Satanic Verses" and was slapped with a fatwa death sentence by
Iranian clerics for his trouble. Third, no one at Newsweek
questioned that religious desecration was a tool of interrogation
sanctioned by the U.S. government, maybe because they wanted to
believe it.

(On top of it all, ordinary common sense should suggest that
flushing a thick book down a toilet is physically impossible, as
anyone who has had to live with the sad state of modern, American,
low-flush plumbing would know.) Newsweek's retraction, announced by
editor Mark Whitaker, was hailed by the White House as a good first
step, but not enough. The administration is now asking Newsweek to
account for how the story was developed in the first place.

While the firewalls between government and media must remain
inviolate, Newsweek needs to make public its internal
investigation. Other news organizations have had to eat large
slices of humble pie when dealing with fabrications by their
reporters: the New York Times with Jayson Blair; the New Republic
with Stephen Glass; and USA Today with Jack Kelley.
Sorting out Newsweek is one thing, best left to its publishers and
owners.

Sorting out the damage done to America's image in the Muslim world
is going to be much harder. The deliberate desecration of the Koran
makes for the perfect instant myth.
In many Muslim countries, anti-American sentiment is highly
combustible and can erupt at any time when someone fans the flames.
Newsweek's retraction will not be as widely accepted as its
original misreporting. One Pakistani Muslim cleric told the BBC
that the retraction was "a crude attempt, both by the weekly
magazine and the American authorities to defuse the anger of
Muslims across the world."

The argument we will hear is that where there's smoke, there's
fire. But with the Newsweek revelations, smoke was all there was.
Muslims around the world, American readers and the U.S. government
as well, do not deserve this from the American media.

Helle
Dale is director of the Douglas and Sarah
Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies of the Heritage
Foundation.